My reactions to reading this collection in 2004.

“Introduction”, Thomas M. Disch -- Disch puts forth the case that Dick was a sf writer’s sf writer. He takes Dick to task for “simple” narratives as if that’s bad -- I would agree that Dick’s plots sometimes don’t hold together too well, but I wouldn’t argue they're simple. For instance, there is his characteristic framing of short stories with the viewpoint of a minor character. He also calls Dick's style lame and says his stereotypical characters could charitably be described as commedia dell-arte (that is truer in his short stories -- Disch just says his “tales” -- but I don’t think it’s true of some of his novels). What Disch admires about Dick and why so many works of sf were inspired by Dick (including, Disch says, his own 334, is his ideas. Dick didn’t draw for inspiration from other genre sources but newspapers, tv, the people he knew, and the world around him. Space colonization, according to Disch, just results in dismal suburbs. (I don’t agree. Suburbs don’t show up in a lot of Dick stories. Dismal, depopulating Earths do. If anything, his stories could be seen as metaphors of decaying urban cores. Urban renewal even shows up as an idea in Dick’s “What If There Were No Benny Cemoli”.) Why bother creating realistic aliens, asks Disch, when they’re just “Halloween mummeries” for different sorts of humans. (That criticism of aliens can hold true for most aliens in sf, but what’s wrong with creating the metaphor?) Disch makes the intriguing observation that Dick’s works are “one of the most accurate and comprehensive pictures of American culture in the Populuxe and Viet Nam eras that exists in contemporary fiction”. I thinks that’s a defensible position, especially since Disch says Dick did it through wondrous metaphors which transformed the commonplace.

“The Little Black Box” -- This is the second or third time I’ve read this story, the genesis of Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The great invention here, and the thing you remember, is the technologically mediated communion of Mercerism, a religion of community and empathy, Christianity without the salvation. I also liked the technological hack of instructions being distributed on how to build the Mercer boxes from scratch. What you don’t remember is the rather lame plot involving the government pursuing Joan Hiashi in order to get her famous musician lover, Ray Meritan. Why not just arrest him directly? However, I did find the Cuban Communist government and the U. S. government wanting to crush Mercerism plausible given that they fear its alien subversion. Rather like the Roman Empire persecuting Christians because they threatened the validity of the state emperor worship, these governments fear their citizens developing communities and bonds (via Mercerism empathy) more important to them than the state. I did like Hiashi’s description of Zen Buddhism (she is a scholar of it): “It extols the virtues of being simple and gullible.”

“The War with the Fnools” -- A somewhat humorous story by Dick in which aliens show up periodically attempting to take over Earth. They all appear in identical form -- and two feet high. I thought most of the humor was in the cultural differences in the responses to them by the American, West German, and Soviet Union. The joke about sex, tobacco, and liquor changing their size and the sex farce with Major Hauk and his buxom secretary was less successful. This story was first published in a magazine I never heard of before: Galactic Outpost. Did they feature sf stories with a Playboy style sexual element not that Playboy's sf stories always had sex).

“Precious Artifact” -- Like Dick’s “The Little Black Box", this serves as a genius for Dick's later novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? since it features the key image of an Earth denuded (via alien invasion) of animal life, including the cats and dogs so important to humans, and mechanical replications of them -- here deceitful alien copies designed to dupe human engineers into working for them. This story has the idea of fakery as many Dick stories do, but here it is the whole image of a crowded, human filled Earth that is faked (through unspecified instrumentality). That level of faking is usually seen only in Dick's novels and not his shorter work. Here aliens have wiped man off Earth but, to dupe the valuable human engineers on Mars into working for them, they fake a human filled Earth (it helps that they can interbreed and form marital relations with humans).

"Retreat Syndrome" -- Starting with 1963, it is interesting to note the increasing presence of drugs as a plot element in Dick's fiction. I noticed it starting with "What the Dead Men Say" in volume 4 of this series and then continuing with "The Little Black Box" and this story -- all from 1963. This is an interesting story and involving story but, for Dick, it seems like a simple story -- at least plot-wise. It turns out that, after a lot of speculation to the contrary, the protagonist really is hallucinating in a mental hospital on Ganymede.

"A Terran Odyssey" -- This is a series of wide-ranging vignettes in the world of Dick's Dr. Bloodmoney; specifically, it is made of excerpts from that novel. I liked it better than the novel though it's been more than 20 years since I've read the later. If I'm remembering the plot correctly, it omits any viewpoint scenes with the orbiting disc jokey Walt Dangerfield though he is mentioned by other characters. I would be curious to know what market Dick intended this excerpt for. It was never published before this collection.

"Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday" -- A modified version of this story is included in Dick's Counter-Clock World. The basic premise of the story -- a world where time runs backward, where effect precedes cause, is intriguing. But it would be difficult to pull off (to my knowledge, only Dick and Brian Aldiss have tried it in novels), and Dick doesn't really succeed. To be sure, Dick works some witty variations on common phrases. There is charm in blowing leaves attaching themselves to trees and the notion of old men facing an inevitable retreat into the womb. The notion of the alien Erd syndicate wiping out human inventions by reversing time was interesting as was the notion of certain people operating in the regular flow of time. But Dick doesn't really explain why there are two timeflows going on or the mysterious F.N.M. (Free Negro Municipality). There also seems something viscerally wrong with people being fully aware of the two directions of time flow. But I think the story really lost it with me from one small detail: the protagonist taking out a packet of whiskers and having them attach to his face (the growth of beards is a handy marker for the direction of timeflow in this story). If Dick was consistent to his logic, the whiskers would have done something like ascend from the sink drain to attach to his face and groomed by the movement of his razor. This is a hard premise to do, and, as Dick shows, you can fail to suspend reader disbelief just from one little detail.

"Holy Quarrel" -- Dick is operating in fine paranoid form in this story. The setup is that a giant computer designed to analyze disparate data wants to launch a nuclear strike. However, some FBI men stop it because the computer seems to be unreliable. First, it has already ordered, in years past, two attacks, one on France and one on Israel that, in retrospect, turned out to be for no good reason. Second, it now wants to launch an attack on Northern California. A computer technician is dragged out of bed to, as he comes to realize, make the decision whether the computer is operating as designed -- to spot and attack enemies long before mere humans do -- or is flawed. It is not, as the protagonist, the repairman (repairman often get a special place in Dick's fiction), says a moral decision but a technical one. That's an interesting set up, but things get even better when it is discovered that the computer is worried about a gumball salesman in Northern California, that he and his run of gumball machines are what must be stopped. That's when the exotic paranoid speculations begin. It is theorized that the gumballs are alien eggs that need the warmth of a child's body to hatch. It is then speculated that the toys from the gumball machines, all miniature versions of weapons or the Genux-B computer itself, actually work. It is then revealed that the computer has religious delusions and regards the gumball salesman as a tool of the devil. The computer is shut off. But Dick has one more twist. It turns out that the gumballs really are an alien lifeform that reproduces exponentially. Out of embarrassment at having wrongly shut the computer down and fear the authorities won't believe him, the repairman doesn't report that. It doesn't make much difference, though, since the gumballs have multiplied in other places other than his apartment. This is a classic Dick story with everyday objects made menacing and plot twist on plot twist.

"A Game of Unchance" -- This story reminded me of Dick's friend Ray Bradbury given that it's set on Mars and features a sinister traveling carnival, both, of course, elements in some of Bradbury's more famous works. Essentially, this is a variation on the traveling swindler who sells the "solution" to a problem which, in turn, requires an even more expensive solution. Here a carnival dupes some Martian settlers into betting a sizeable portion of the harvest on some small, robotic dolls they hope are valuable. The dolls turn out to be a menace though as they attack the farmers and go feral like animals, burrowing in the ground and poisoning water supplies. Their eradication requires homeostatic traps (rather like those in Dick's Dr. Bloodmoney). The same carnival, passing through again, sells those traps -- for the entire harvest this time.

"Not By Its Cover" -- This is a funny story I enjoyed as much the second time around as the first. It's the story of how the immortal pelts of the wub alter the text of the books they cover -- and the alterations are always to propagandize and comment on the immortality they possess and think all lifeforms do. The story ends with the publisher who discovers this fact (some of the described alterations to famous books are quite funny like "Physician, heal thyself" frequently added to Freud's writings) binding a medical text in wub fur in the hopes that the text will be altered to describe how to make humans immortal.

"Return Match" -- This is the second time I've read this story, I believe. It has some good things to say about the psychology of gambling when a policeman discovers his own gambling tendencies when he knowingly confronts a pinball machine slowly, with each play, improving its chances to kill him via a catapulted steel ball. He continues to play even though the danger increases each time while his odds of winning get less. The paranoia of a pinball machine designed to kill is good (as Dick says in his story notes, this is another of his "dangerous toy" stories). And the constant alteration that machine undertakes to bring itself closer to killing its player-opponent (this is motivated by the alien gambling syndicate that wants to hurt the police raiding their operations and seizing their equipment) is interesting and today that would probably be called evolutionary design. However, the story is very flawed by its silly ending which has the policeman protagonist holed up in his apartment and under assault by giant steel balls. Turning his home and the world at large into a lethal pinball game was ludicrous and broke the tone of the story.

"Faith of Our Fathers" -- This story was written for Harlan Ellison's taboo-breaking Dangerous Visions anthology, and it shows it. To be sure the mild profanity and sex are different than preceding Dick works that I've read (though I'm not sure how shocking they were even in the context of the times), and he notes his combining sex, drugs, communism, and God was controversial. I think the story is noteworthy for a couple of reasons. As Dick states in his notes, this story is built around the premise that psychedelic drugs (another sign of the increasing presence of various drugs in his stories and, I assume, his life at this point) would make the mystical religious experiences available to all. But I think the main interest is its gnostic themes. Protagonist Tung Chien discovers that he and the rest of the populace have been drugged into not seeing the true nature of the Absolute Benefactor, leader of the worldwide ascendant Communist Party. He takes a counteragent for the drugging and, when he meets the leader, he sees the strange, terrifying form of a god who creates and kills, is good and evil, kills the living, resurrects the dead. It is sort of a gnostic vision of the Demiurge. At story's end, the protagonist is dying of a wound caused by the Benefactor's touch and, in his few remaining hours, seeks solace by lovemaking with a subversive woman he has met. You could see the conflating of such a god with a communist leader as a comment on communisms, but there's nothing to indicate in the story notes that Dick was making a political statement. Rather, his starting speculations were religious.

"The Story to End All Stories for Harlan Ellison's Anthology Dangerous Visions" -- This is the only short short story I can recall ever seeing from Dick. It's a humorous one paragraph story describing a plot that combines all the supposed taboo elements of the stories in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions: cannibalism, sacrilege, xenoality, and homosexuality. This story was published in 1968, and the Ellison anthology appeared in 1967, so it's probably a genuine response to actually seeing the book.

"The Electric Ant" -- I've read this celebrated story before. Essentially it's solipsistic, and, while Dick makes the details plausible and interesting in how the protagonist modifies the punched computer tape that feeds him stimuli to perceive different versions of reality or nothing, the story's ending, where the entire universe begins to decay because it's all been a product of his perception, is cheap and illogical (why doesn't it blink out of existence right away?).

"Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked" -- This unpublished fantasy from 1971 has, I suspect, some revealing psychological insights into Dick's troubled relations with women. The beaver Cadbury just wants to go about his business and collect blue chips. His shrewish wife rails against his lack of energy and ambition and that he doesn't provide her everything she would like. She even sets him up by sending him a fake solicitation to adultery from an anonymous woman and throws his typewriter out the window. He eventually meets the woman he plans on leaving his wife for: an unstable woman who splits into three women (perhaps Dick's theory as to the type of women that exist). The first loves him with "comradely love" like a sister who perceives him clearly and has no aversion to him, does not repudiate him. The second is a mother type always protecting yet frail and gentle. The third is like a daughter who will always be embarrassed and disappointed by him and will eventually desert him for a younger man. However, they all tell him they will eventually desert him, that they only want the obvious symbol of money, blue chips, from him because they want to live and not just survive. The motherly type woman says she won't live with him but will stop in from time to time and "supercharge" him (another drug reference). They all do leave Cadbury, but the latter woman does seem to do so with a bit more reluctance. It's an odd story, pretty obviously quite personal, and its odd, ambiguous ending may have kept it from being published -- assuming Dick ever tried.

"A Little Something for Us Tempunauts" -- There are a couple of interesting things in this story. One is, as Dick says in his story notes, the analogy between this 1973 story of a government time travel and program and Dick's "weariness over the space program". The second is its psychological truths. The setup is that the United States' first three tempunauts are killed upon return but yet their younger selves travel ahead to attend their funerals. Dick handles the paradoxes pretty well; the explanations are understandable even if the pliancy of the tempunauts in following their government's orders as to not say anything seems a bit implausible -- on the other hand, they're disciplined military types who want the program to succeed and be funded and continued for national prestige despite their deaths. One of the tempunauts is convinced that the three are caught in a time loop, that they have lived the few days of the story again and again. Eventually, he convinces his comrades this is true, and he deliberately brings about the explosion that kills the astronauts, thus hoping to end the loop. However, things are ambiguous at the end. The astronaut, depressed, may be wrong about being caught in a time loop. A consulting scientist tells him that sabotaging the return flight by adding an unplanned for hundred pounds of Volkswagon parts to the machine will almost certainly set up a loop -- implying that one doesn't exist now, that he will doom himself and his comrades to what he fears has already happened. The ambiguity comes in because the ending implies that the astronaut longs for eternal life at the grand moment of his funeral which he attends as corpse and observer. He really wants what he claims to fear: a "wonderful burden", "the dreadful and weary miracle of eternal life". Dick's story notes indicate that the depression protagonist Addison Doug feels is similar to what he felt when writing the story. Dick talks about the "awareness of defeat", its likelihood, causing one to regard action as futile, that a depressed person gets into a feedback cycle contemplating this. What Dick said he did is, via sf trappings, convert this inner psychological problem into the external world where it affects others. Doug's depression about possibly existing in a time loop of futility leads him to create -- and drag others into -- such a loop. Samuel Delany talks about sf literalizing metaphors. Here Dick is describing a process of externalizing, via sf, psychological states into the general world and affecting the inner worlds of others. (Something similar happens in his novels Eye in the Sky and A Maze of Death.) Dick also makes an interesting remark about the nature of time travel stories. He says the essence of the best ones is the time traveler confronting himself which happens here. On a completely unrelated matter, I found it interesting that Dick has an "elegant young black" as a government security agent in a time when the popular notion of young blacks was in opposition to the government. An ironical political statement or just the reflexive reversal of things that Dick was fond of?

"The Pre-Persons" -- This is the second time I've read this very controversial story, and lot more thoughts and questions come to my mind now since I was looking past the initial shock of Dick's anti-abortion polemic. I suspect this story, finished on Dec. 20, 1973 according to the notes, was inspired by the infamous Roe v. Wade decision earlier in the year. (Supporting this speculation is that the story mentions new legislation that makes twelve year olds safe from killing. That sort of reversal of moral logic -- the law now forbidding what it should never have once allowed as opposed to Roe v. Wade now permitting what should not be permitted -- is the sort of thing Dick would have done if inspired by the court case.) Here any child under twelve can be aborted. At twelve, they gain the ability to do algebra and a soul enters their body. (Twelve is actually a legislative compromise age. The Church of Watchers wanted three. It's unstated what their opponents wanted.) Dick evokes comparisons with Nazis and putting down unwanted pets. The abortion truck is like a dogcatcher's truck. The children are taken to a pound-like complex where, if not adopted in thirty days, they are killed. Like the buses the Nazis took Jews off in, there is some attempt to disguise the vehicle's menace. Here the abortion truck plays ice cream truck like jingles. There is also Nazi bureaucraticism in the "D" (for desirability) papers that kids must present if under twelve. Dick dismisses some of the arguments in favor of abortion. He rejects it even in this world of overpopulation, dwindling resources, and pollution. To him, it is a plot by cheap taxpayers and the old and powerful against the young and helpless. He even anticipates (though it wouldn't have been hard) the various reactions by anti-abortion foes. Ed Gantro tries to shame society by insisting, as a grown man, that he should be killed since he can't do algebra and, therefore, has no soul. (He actually has a degree in mathematics.) Ian Best contemplates firebombing abortion trucks. There is such a sickness in society that Cynthia Best, Ian's wife and mother of Walter who lives in fear of the abortion trucks -- for others since he is twelve and thereby possesses that most crucial Dick quality: empathy), even wants to have an abortion because it's fashionable and thinks the preserved embryo would make a good home decoration. Rabid feminist Joann Russ famously wrote a vicious letter to Dick in response to this story. Yet, in a way, if she thought this story an attack on women, she may have been right in a small way. The story seems almost as much an attack on modern, feminist minded women as it does an anti-abortion story. Cynthia Best is described as a "castrating" female, an exemplar of a modern, powerful woman who does not suckle children or make dinner. Her type wages war on life and, particularly men and boys. I thinks it's significant that all the children you see frightened of or threatened by abortions are male. At story's end, Gantro and Ian realize that there is no escape from the world of such women. I think there's a lot of anger by Dick at women in this story. Perhaps he knew somebody like Cynthia. However, he doesn't seem to have had the best relations with women anytime however needy he was for them -- another psychological truth that comes through in his "Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked". Dick's anti-abortion attack is powerful, but he weakens his case by correctly and explicitly stating abortion is an attack on the defenseless and innocent but implying that what is really going on is women killing men.

"The Eye of the Sibyl" -- I was looking forward to reading what, at first, seemed to be a very rare historical fantasy from Dick. However, this story, which starts out in the Roman Republic, turns out to be related to Dick's VALIS works as evidenced by the presence of an sf writer named Phil living in 1974, a tyrannical world called the Iron Prison. This story was not published in Dick's lifetime, and it's ambiguous ending which doesn't really go anywhere is probably why. I understand, from what I've read of Dick's life, that the VALIS works come from a mystical experience he had staring February 3, 1974 (I read this story on the thirtieth anniversary of it.). Since this story was written around May 17, 1975, I wonder if this is his earliest attempt to dramatize that experience.

"The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of Its Tree" -- This funny, if unpublished, story features protagonist Joe Contemptible in a world where various machines -- all with the title Mr. as in Mr. Coffeepot (I suspect Dick was inspired by the trademark Mr. Coffee), Mr. Computer, Mr. Newspaper -- are centrally controlled by a computer which becomes deranged sometimes. As the story starts and the machines are malfunctioning, Contemptible thinks that the computer has been reading the "archaic trash" of "old Phil Dick science fiction stories" again. To straighten out the psyche of the computer, a Mrs. Simpson is periodically revived from her slumber where she listens to old radio serials. The latest breakdown of the computer is precipitated by Contemptible planning suicide, and Simpson and him end up becoming lovers. A slight, but funny, story.

"The Exit Door Leads In" -- Another of those sf stories about bizarre educational institutions and tests that aren't what they seem to be. Here the protagonist is drafted into a college where he fails to exhibit the required independence from authority. This story was originally published in something called Rolling Stone College Papers.

"Chains of Air, Web of Aether" -- This is another VALIS related story, specifically one that was incorporated into Dick's The Divine Invasion. It also features the character of Linda Fox who, I understand, also figures prominently in Dick's VALIS, and Fox is inspired by Dick's infatuation with Linda Rondstadt. I'm not sure what the end implies exactly, but I thought the story seemed psychologically true with the protagonist's resentment at meeting and help a terminally ill neighbor who eventually beats her cancer though she may end up crazy though I think her talk of soap opera represents an escape into fiction and not insanity. Protagonist McVane also hates the cancerous Rybus mocking Fox whose work he regards as "luminferous aether" in a world of pain and disappointment.

"Strange Memories of Death" -- This is a strange story, more of an autobiographical essay than fiction. It doesn't seem to contain any fantasy elements unless the title is hinting that the story is being related by a dead man. Written in 1980 and published in Interzone (which may have waived the requirement for a sf story just to have something by Dick), I suspect it's from the time when Dick finally came into some money from selling the movie rights to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The "story" is told from the point of view of a man whose apartment building has just went condo. He has enough money to buy his apartment and does because, as he says, he's lazy and he likes the neighborhood. However, he wonders what happened to the crazed and eccentric Lysol Lady who inhabited the building for years. He knows she can't buy her apartment and is being evicted. The narrator ruminates that he is a disaffected eccentric like her, that the only thing separating him from her fate of eviction and painful psychic dislocation is that he has the money (and its attendant respectability) to buy his apartment. The ending seems to be some sort of joke I don't get. When he finds out the Lysol Lady has been offered aid and relocated, that she doesn't even have to pay rent any more, he says "I wish someone would pay my rent." The reply is "You're not paying rent. ... "You're buying your apartment." I suppose Dick is saying that he is no longer in the same category as the Lysol Lady, but we know that already.

"I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" -- Reminiscent of Dick's "Retreat Syndrome" earlier in this anthology (and his A Maze of Death), this is a story about people trapped in a world of computer generated stimuli. Here a man incompletely enters a state of suspended animation. To preserve his sanity on the long space voyage, the computer feeds him stimuli, and then, in the worlds the protagonist's mind creates, comes to realize the man is very neurotic and guilt-ridden. Eventually, as with the protagonist in "Retreat Syndrome", it is revealed that this story's protagonist is permanently trapped in a illusionary world generated by guilt. He even thinks the real reuniting with his former wife is an illusion.

"Rautavaara's Case" -- Dick's novels and stories seem, since at least his 1970 novel A Maze of Death to increasingly use Christian and gnostic themes and images. Of course, the most obvious example of this is the VALIS related stuff. This story isn't a VALIS story but does feature the idea of reversal of communion, specifically an alien religion where the god gains life by eating his creation (of course, they find our Christian communion as scary and perverse as we find theirs). This story is stylistically significant for Dick because it's the only work of his I can think of told from the first-person perspective of aliens.

"The Alien Mind" -- This is a slight and odd and short story. A space traveler, delivering crucial vaccines to an alien planet, is temporarily diverted from his course by his cat messing around with the controls. He chucks the cat out the airlock. The aliens seemingly disapprove of this since they are concerned with the safety of all lifeforms. They sabotage the man's ship so he can return to Terra in suspended animation but must, for two years, contemplate his killing of the cat and eat nothing but cat food. ( )

As part of a research project, I read just two of the stories in this book; my three-star rating is thus not an attempt to judge its merit but just an attempt to give a neutral rating. (It's a pity GR doesn't offer the option of simply not rating a book.)

"Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday" (Amazing, August 1966) was the short story upon which Dick based his novel Counter-Clock World, which I (re)read recently. The same ingredients are there -- such as the Hobart Phase (which makes time run backwards), the People's Topical Library (whose task is to erase books and other artefacts as they reach the point of their creation), sogum (to which the less thought devoted the better), the Free Negro Municipality (i.e., one half of a now bipartite US) and the Anarch Peak (the great prophet/visionary/genius of the FNM) -- but very different things are done with them.

In the novel, the Hobart Phase is worldwide (but doesn't extend to Mars); here, it's much more localized, and the reason this is so is because of the invention, by one Ludwig Eng, of the swabble, a device that controls the Phase. Now, with time running backwards, there are fewer and fewer copies of his masterpiece, How I Made My Own Swabble out of Ordinary Household Objects in My Basement During My Spare Time, swabbles have all but disappeared, and people are forgetting what they are. The time is nigh for Eng to be paid by the Library to erase the book. (Being paid, in the story, involves money being taken from you -- poverty being a desirable state that people hope to attain. It's a silly conceit, and Dick wisely dropped it for the novel.) Eng, however, resists the annihilation of his great contribution to human welfare, and seeks the aid of the Anarch Peak, who's by now reduced to toddlerhood. (Much of the novel centres on activities surrounding the resuscitation of the Anarch in his grave, and his exhumation; as noted, Dick put similar notions to very different uses in the two works.) After Eng's encounter with the Anarch, the Phase is negated and (within the areas of its operation) time kicks back into travelling in its ordinary direction. Slowly it dawns on all concerned that what'll happen next is that Eng will once more invent the swabble so that the Hobart Phase will once more be established . . . In other words, a time-loop is being set up. Luckily a clever fellow called Larry Arbuthnot realizes the way out of this is to write How I Disassembled My Swabble into Ordinary Household Objects in My Basement During My Spare Time and then prevail upon the Library to pay him to erase it . . .

I'm not a hundred per cent sure the (sciencefictional) logic of this particular time-loop holds up, but the tale bubbles along enjoyably enough -- indeed, I think that, of the two works, it's the one I prefer.

The other story I mined this collection for, "A Little Something for Us Tempunauts" (Final Stage ed Edward L. Ferman & Barry N. Malzberg, 1974), is likewise concerned with a time-loop. The USA's first three tempunauts die when their craft implodes on return from what's presumed to have been a trip a century into the future (thereby defeating the earlier Soviet achievement of a few decades; shades of the Sputnik/Mercury affair). In fact the trip succeeded in going only a week or two into the future; the three tempunauts are thus present in the aftermath of their own deaths; in the story's jargon, they're engaged in Emergence Time Activity.

One of them, Addison Doug, realizes that they've thereby become trapped in a time-loop, that they (and the rest of the world) have gone through this a hundred or a thousand or a million times before. Much as he loves his girlfriend/wife Merry Lou Hawkins (the text gives both versions of their relationship, and there are other little hiccups to suggest Dick was making this up as he went along and didn't revise as thoroughly as he might), Addison and his compadres decide they must break the loop; they believe the way to do this is to take back with them a sack of old auto parts, so that the increased mass on their return will, through violation of conservation principles, cause an implosion that will kill them. The trouble is that the evidence is all around them that this is what they did the last time, and all the other times before that; even when this is pointed out to Addison, a depressive, he deliberately ignores the information and steadfastly works to continue the infinite cycle all the while telling others and likely even himself that he's trying to break it.

It's a tale that seemed to me, on first reading, not to work; it's only now that I've made myself sit down and write about it that I realize it's a lot subtler and has a lot more depth than I'd realized. (This is a large part of what GoodReads is for, so far as I'm concerned!)





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I like PKD's novels, but I love his short stories. This one doesn't disappoint. Only wish I could get some of the other volumes now. ( )